Earth_Wyrm makes a good point about shared connections - I don't care much myself (I have a monthly dl cap but it's pretty high, and I just get slow service if I exceed it, so no extra fees or anything) - but I bet if my best friend's son exceeded their dl cap with a game mod she'd be furious since she'd be affected too. Never really thought about that before.


I can't do any of those things atm. So yeah, space is an issue, and will be until I can afford a couple more externals and have time to do a full backup and reformat (which will be a while, got lots of big expenses coming up the next few months). And I'd get a chisel and remove the stupid stuck DVD drive, but DVDs are way too small to be useful.

I will dl stuff I really want regardless though, I just can't use it until I've sorted the rest out. B)


I like screens for things like that too - head/hair packs, modder resources, anything like that I like screens included, and also house mods and such too. Yes it can be a little annoying when downloading if there's a lot - but later on when you're looking for stuff or deciding which house suits a particular character, the screens can save a LOT of time and that more than makes up for it IMO.

No, it doesn?t matter to me as my internet connection is pretty fast. But I couldn?t vote in the poll, because it?s not possible to vote "no" and leave the rest out, as others have stated before, so you can?t trust the results.

I like new models and textures in mods, and this usually makes it bigger filesize. No problem.

I'm wondering if the dislike for included screenshots doesn't come from the fact that often people who are new pack screens in .bmp format, artificially bloating the size of the download (I think I've seen several such situations)

And as for the poll itself - if the mod is interesting, the size doesn't matter (although in the case of larger files I'm unwilling to download it without some screens)

I play MW on an old Dell notebook, with a 30 G harddrive, so in a sense, size matters. But thankfully, I moved any and all MW related mods, images, how-to's, and files to an external Seagate 320 G drive. That way, anything goes wrong with the clunker, I can still have everything on the external. But a mod's size doesn't deter me, but a mod's dependency does. I can't tell you how many mods that I was looking forward to enjoying, but it may have been dependent upon a certain head replacer or a certain other mod that may make a group of existing mods in my Morrowind incompatible. I understand a lot of the older clothing or unique clothing mods were head dependent, but now with so many combined and merged head pack, it gets a little confusing.

The DL issue I thankfully worked out (we are actually still dial-up here in this complex) by using the public library or my father-in-law's set-up, which has highspeed.

I was required to make a selection for every question in the poll, that's why your answers might be a little skewed.

Ya it's insisting on an answer to each question. Ive therefore not voted as it'll skew the results.

- download size is no issue for me
- I do take note of the description, screen shots, peoples comments and ratings to gauge if I should take a look at something
- a couple of screens in the download is ok but I prefer them to be on the download page so they can be reviewed prior to d/l
- the modder's general reputation and my previous experience with their work will also play a factor, yes

:)
-kwm

Thanks for those giving feedback on how the poll works - I've added some neutral replies to get around the problem of needing to answer every question

So if you previously have read the poll but didn't vote due to skewing the results or not having enough choices hopefully this will fix that without changing the previous results in any way

Some have been making mention of the issue not being the size of the download but how big the mod is when unpacked

I think the biggest mod I know of was Lady Rae's mall of insanity which had a compressed size of something like 260mb but unpacked to 4gigs. Lady Rae did note that in her mods description though.

So maybe it would be useful for large mods to state in their descriptions how big the final product will be ?

I see the tga vs dds issue still bothers some - I'm guessing that is due to a desire to keep file sizes optimized ?

for comments, if they are put like something I can take serious,or are made by people I can take seroiusly, then they matter.
screenshots is nice,but my hang up is lack of readmes,specially if it is complex mods.

size don?t matter much,tga?s aint an issue,use them my self so can?t argue about that,can I ?
actually it is better to get tga originals and do dds converting as you like after,if it bothers you

I deleted my vote and revoted, others should be able to do the same.

For me, what influences if I download a large mod, is how well the author 'sells' it I guess, (video trailer, a good description and screenshots on the download page are a big plus,) and also how others regard the mod. I do actually take user comments and votes into account a lot when choosing whether to download a large mod, unless the vote or comment seems unfair or just a difference in opinion.

I don't think it makes a difference, inasmuch as if the mod is good, people will download it regardless of size.

Obviously you should aim for smaller filesizes, so if you think you can reasonably create the same effect with vanilla textures/meshes as with user-made resources, then using vanilla will keep the sizes down. That said, if it is your express intention to create something unusual or unique and that's not possible with what's shipped with the game, then that's the point of having the ability to add new things in and often what's already there just is not a good enough match with the image that's in your head.

As to any worries that sheer size will stop people downloading, my most downloaded mod is 340MB - whereas the tiny vanilla mods I make for Fallout 3 struggle to get a hundred downloads each!

did so as well.

just recognized that plangkyes hilgya has 700 mb (with expansion) which makes still 100 mb packed. and i love it taking her as an example, after i got hilgya i went and took her telvanni meshes and textures too and then grabbed mournhold. i hope connary will excuse these two

i did not care anything about size but once i recognized her excellent work, i got nearly everything from her. i think that's why i voted "trusting the modder"
if i'm convinced that a modder works great i go and take all the works of him that fits into my game.

Only a few things ever bother me that effect a mods size:
1. Using a format like .zip rather then 7z. It implies the modder didn't think about best packaging for the mod.
2. Including thumbs.db files. Yes, they are tiny, but again it's shows a lack of attention to detail, and we all know that lack of attention to detail in Morrowind is the source of many a nasty bug.
3. Using bmps for textures rather than dds or tga. Yes, dds are smaller but some swear they are too lossy compared to tga. BMP however are just bloated. No reason to use them over tga, which are lossless.
4. Using MSWord docs or docxs when an html,rtf or txt would be quite adequate and much smaller.
5. Including Nifs with bloat, such as redundant nodes. Using Nifskope to sanitize redundant nodes is easy enough.

I can think of fine mods that include all these, but I do tend to approach a mod that breaks these rules with, perhaps, unwarranted caution.
If nothing else, not doing any of the above will make for a smaller download.

There's no reason to un-necessarily bloat the file (make your readme a text file, leave screenshots on the PES page only or maybe include one small jpeg, compress things nicely), but filesize doesn't matter for me. I generally burn through a few gigs of bandwidth a day, pushing the Comcast limits of 250 gigs a month, and my connection is going to be bumped up to 100 mbit soon. So, given all that, no, it's a non-issue.

However, I know plenty of people have problems. The main thing is compression.
First off, forget ZIP. It's crap, no matter how you use it. Many people say 7-zip is the way to go, but in my tests on Morrowind mods with lots of meshes and textures, RAR can usually get smaller sizes than 7z (both turned up all the way). So, if you want a common format, go for RAR and set it to the 'best' preset. That'll do a good job.
If you're still looking at a huge file, take a page out of Rzr1911's book and use a UHARC/batch combo. It's a pain, no doubt about it, but well worth it for the largest mods. On good days, UHARC can compress a 6 gig data files directory into roughly 300 megs. If you have sound in your mod, Mp3-to-Ogg and UHARC will save you insane amounts of space. UHARC does not have a GUI, though, so you'll need to write a one-line batch script to decompress your mod (something like uharc -u mymod.uha) and you'll need to double-wrap it (UHA and BAT with TXT instructions inside a RAR). Even with all that bother, you can still save quite a bit of space. It's only worth it when you start looking at a gig or have a lot of sounds.

I have limited hard-drive space. DLing is fine for me though. Generally for big mods I consider how much the mod will add to my own personal gameplay. For example, MCA and TR are both pretty big but they add a lot too, pretty much in proportion to their size (... I guess. Kinda hard to measure that, but whatever. We'll handwave that. ).

But let's imagine a hypothetical mod that added a shop that sold a dozen new unique robes, and everything in the shop had custom meshes and high res textures all adding up to a huge file size. I probably wouldn't bother with it because it's just one shop and a dozen robes which aren't going to impact my gameplay all that much. If I happened to really like the robes from their screenshots and found them irresistable, I'd download the mod and do a hatchet job on it myself in the CS and just keep the robes part, deleting any files I wasn't using any more.


BTW, on a size-to-content ratio, I reckon it's pretty hard to beat the LGNPC mods!

I would rather not have to download a large mod if there are ways to reduce the archive size without hurting the mod itself, but if I want a mod enough, I'm willing to download it even if it is quite large. I suppose it depends on how much I want a mod, generally, though, if I really want a mod, I'm not going to stop downloading it over a large download size.

So I suppose that if there are measures that can be taken to reduce the download size that won't have any sufficient impact on the mod itself, such as say, using a text file for the readme (It always does annoy me when mods use some sort of larger file type where that would suffice just as well.) or not including screenshots in the download (I never saw why that was necessary anyway, since I've already seen the screenshots on the download page, and if I've downloaded it, you've already gotten me to want it, you don't need screenshots to entice me. The only way I can see it being necessary is for comparison if there's more than one option in regards to how something looks in the mod.) but there's no need to take measures that will reduce the quality of the mod.

For me as long as it is below around 40gb then it doesn't matter but if it is above that I would have to do extensive hd cleaning to download it. (Currently only have 30gb left out of 2tb) When it comes to speed our connection is 12mbps with no limit on bandwidth usage. I always determine what mods I download by description and interest except for purely graphical mods which I determine by screenshots.

Melian: You either have a virus that is causing that problem or your hd is going bad unless you are not properly shutting down your computer. (not properly shutting down your computer through using shut down in Windows can cause data loss)

PS. Screenshots in the archive is useful when I reinstall Morrowind after a break from it especially with graphical mods.

It would depend on the mod; If it's good enough, it'll be worth the DL size. This sort of question seems to be more suited to Oblivion though, as the file sizes for mods are always much larger then in Morrowind: I've never seen a MW mod that's larger than 500megs (Though i know they exist, and I can only wonder just what's contained in them to make them so large).

I doubt it. This has happened on 2 different systems so far and the first time I noticed it was about 3 years ago.

Quite possibly there is limit in the Morrowind code that is there because the game was never expected to be modded this amount so it was never tested. For example if a tree structure was used to hold the list of files in a directory and the number of files was represented as a signed short integer, the maximum number of files that Morrowind can "see" in a directory would 2¹⁵-1

So... quick mental maths... _{carry the eight}... 32767

Well, There is a limit on the Number of Plugins allowed to be loaded, so it seems probable that there's a limit of files in the directory as well. I wonder if something similar occurs with other games? Like Oblivion or Fallout 3. (What are the mod limits on those, btw? Is it over 200 like Morrowind?)

Kudos for being able to do that in your head. Anyway, it was a guess on my part as it was the only clear reason I could see as to why the issue would occur. I doubt I am right at all.



The limit is due to the fact that each object in the save game has a single byte (which can hold 2⁸ (256) different values) to hold which mod it comes from. I think Oblivion had the same limit.

The problem is that melian is saying the files are disappearing from the directory after there are so many files in there. It isn't supposed to happen and isn't a limitation of the filesystem. The files on your hd are just data associated with a name in the FAT (File Allocation Table) and directories are just a way of organizing those files and are stored away from the file names. I have a very large amount of files on my computer (several million) and have had folders with over 100,000 files in them and have never ran across the problem of disappering files on my own computer. The only times I have run into this kind of problem is on computers that I have worked on and it was usually one of a few things like a virus, bad hd controller, or bad hd.

Well some girls say size doesnt matter and its about how you use it.... :blink: oh wait, wrong forum

Size is a complete non issue. The size of a mod is just a consequence of what the mod does. Some of my favorite mods include Nymeria's Monthly Respawn (414 bytes) and The Face Pack Compilation (over 1 gig compressed). The only concern with a mod is "Does this mod do something I wish to have done in my game?" If a mod is 414 bytes and and changes Fargoth into a Bretton female I could careless. If a mod is 14 gig and adds a new custom dance idol to every NPC I could again care less. Has nothing to do with size. (the rest of this thought will remain unspoken)